Characteristics and Features of a Successful Company

As per me, to be successful, every company needs to have some external characteristics as well as some crucial internal characteristics. The external characteristics here are those which are easily visible to the outside world. And by internal characteristics I mean those characteristics or features of a company that only the people working in the back ground can see. In all probability, as far as I can see, these people who work in the background are the employees of the company.

External characteristics:

a)      Service to customers: Before moving to the US in 2012, I stayed for 12 years (2000 - 2012) in Bangalore, a city in southern part of India. I call Bangalore my home. This city is host to thousands of restaurants. Every Friday, newspapers carry review of a new restaurant that opened the previous week. However, not all these restaurants run successfully for a long period of time. Initially, they put lots of emphasis on customer service and quality and taste of food. However, once they start making money, they lose the plot and subsequently even their customers, who want to get the same, if not better, quality of food and service every time they come to the restaurant.

Restaurants belong to the service industry and hence customer service is of paramount importance to them. However, I have observed that every company, big or small, can sustain itself only if it is able to give a service of supreme quality.

Airtel is currently the no.1 data and communication service provider in India. It is the third largest telecommunications company in the world. I have always been a huge fan of Airtel only because of their superior customer service. And because of this, Airtel has always been able to command higher calling rates as compared to its competitors.  However, in recent years, its customer service has seen deterioration. The customer service agents are not up to mark and most of the times do not deliver their promises. The time duration to resolve an issue is quite long. This made me leave Airtel and take connection from one of its competitors. Not only me, but even my friends are complaining about the declining customer service of Airtel on their Facebook pages. In today’s time, when Facebook and twitter identify the individuality of a person, an incident of bad customer service spreads like wild fire and moulds people’s perception of a company or a company’s external characteristic. Hence, as per me, customer service is the no.1 characteristic of a company, from the point of view of finding a success mantra.

A good customer service is highly essential to not only find and acquire customers but also to retain the existing customers and find new customers.

b)   Quality and Time: To be successful, it is very, very important that a company manufactures quality products that meets the need of its target customers and deliver the products in time. And the company will have to do so very consistently. Not only do companies need to shorten their lead times but they also need to deliver the products within a short time window. In today’s busy world, making your customer wait for a four hours window would be enough reason for him/her to look for the services/products of a competitor.

Internal characteristics:

a)       Keeping employees happy: Be it a small coffee shop or a major IT company, the top management needs to understand that the company cannot grow or become successful as they want it to until all the employees of the company feel that they belong here and the company belongs to them too. To achieve this, a company has to give equal importance to each and every employee, no matter what his designation or level is. A company cannot grow if its employees are not happy with their compensation or with their work or if they are facing personal issues. A successful company will definitely have a system in place to address even the personal issues of its employees.

b)     Finding the right customer base: In order to be able to serve its customers effectively and efficiently, as pointed out above, a company must have a great analysis/analytics team which can effectively identify the right customers that they would need to target to sell their products/services to. A restaurant specializing in Italian food items, but residing in a predominantly English speaking region, cannot afford to have waiters/managers speaking only Italian. If you do not identify or recognize your customer base correctly and do not act accordingly, you will not be able to give good service to your customers. No wonder terms like 'Big Data', 'Data Scientist', etc have become so popular. Consulting companies are offering to help their clients find out the right customers for them and focus their marketing efforts towards those 'right customers', by making use of the tons and tons of (BIG) data that their clients are sitting on.